On Agile teams, use the name PO instead of BA
Scrum has taken the agile landscape space. According to VersionOne 13th State of Agile Report [1]: 54% of agile projects uses Scrum (against 1% using XP and 5% using Kanban).
The Scrum framework prescribes three roles: ScrumMaster (SM), Product Owner (PO) and team member.
SM is the facilitator, the person familiar with the Scrum framework that should help the Scrum team to reach their Sprint goals by fostering a great teamwork and by removing the blockers that might show up. The SM main goal is to deliver the thing right. The focus is on teamwork efficiency.
The PO’s main responsibilities are: (1) to manage the Product Backlog, (2) to maintain the communication with the business stakeholders and (3) to answer the team’s questions about the work related to the product features under creation. The PO main goal is to ensure the team delivers the right thing. The focus is on product results and efficacy.
Anyone else on the team is a Scrum team member: a person, either a specialised or a cross-functional type of professional, helping the team towards the Sprint goals. Typically, Scrum team members are dedicated to one and only Scrum team. The focus is teamwork for doing the right thing and doing it right.
Back on the days, at least on the 90s, there was the traditional Analysis phase [2]. With it, there was a role named Business Analyst (BA).
But, from 2000 onwards, there were the early agile companies: Influenced by Agile, these companies demanded the “business” (or product) people to work in a more agile fashion. They should know how to work with Agile requirements, and they should be available for the team.
The reality, in the beginning of the century the typical businesspeople did not know how to work with agile requirements. Typically, the businesspeople were not available to the “technical” team (to sit with the developers, on the same table if possible, all day!)
So, what happened? Some of these BA people learned how to work with the agile teams.
Back in 2006 when I started coaching about agile, I thought it made lots of sense. I used to think “a modern BA works the agile way, while a traditional BA works in a more waterfall style”.
Before 2006, it was very difficult to find BAs that had hands-on agile experience. But as agile and Scrum got famous, many companies and consultancies were also getting experienced with how to handle the business requirements on an agile way.
The division between Mode 1 (waterfall) or Mode 2 (agile) became more apparent. Gartner even published a famous paper on the bimodal IT on 2011 [3].
FONT: https://www.gartner.com/it-glossary/bimodal/
But here is the mismatch, the role name confusion.
The PO role shows up as a Mode 2, agile way of working, while the BA role was viewed as a role on Mode 1. That is the confusion. These days, many companies are using agile (Mode 2), but still using a Mode 1 denomination: BA.
That’s the confusion. That’s the mixed message. The world has changed. The majority of agile companies the Scrum framework vocabulary: Daily, Retrospective, Sprint, PO, etc.
Therefore, my post title and advice: on Agile teams, use the name PO instead of BA; this reduces the confusion and ambiguity on these roles definition.
Looking forward to you feedback and great comments to this (very) sensitive topic.
References:
[1] VersionOne 13th State of Agile Report (2019);
https://www.stateofagile.com/#ufh-i-521251909-13th-annual-state-of-agile-report/473508
[2] Project Management: Best Practices for IT Professionals, 1st edition (2000); https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/project-management-best/0130219142/ch07.html
[3] Achieving Enterprise Agility through Bimodal Transformation, Gartner.com (2011); https://www.gartner.com/imagesrv/media-products/pdf/ALTIMETRIK/Altimetrik-1-354WZ5A.pdf
Originally posted at Caroli.org
Helping companies build Digital Solutions | Professor | Author | PhD in Business and Management
5 年?? Paulo Caroli,?thank you for bringing enlightenment to the topic.? As Fabricio and Aaron mentioned, I think that another vital variable to take as a reference is the organization design. Who is the owner of the business results? Who is responsible for understanding the market details? Who needs to own business skills? I have been working with some BAs that are responsible for creating and validating business hypotheses. After that work, a product person or the team translate those insights into scope (backlog). As you proposed, using the role definition of PO from Scrum, BAs could evolve for it.
Building foundation models, predictive/time-series, and agent frameworks to help our customers realize the promise of generative AI at NVIDIA
5 年BA needs to evolve to PO. The two are not the same, but it's a modernization of the role. BAs are trained to discover and document requirements from "business people" as a liaison. PM means you *are* a business person with a general manager mindset and authority to prioritize. It means *you* structure the metrics, make the bets, and drive the portfolio. Another way of framing the PO role is "full stack BA" who doesn't just write the stories, but collaborates among competing interests to define and actuate on the metrics that drive results.
Business Consultant, Teacher and Professional Speaker
5 年?? Paulo Caroli, it is a fact that a PO must do a lot of Business Analysis tasks. But just rename the Business Analyst from traditional IT structures as a PO won't work for Scrum. The Product Owner must be someone from the business, committed not to projects, but to a product, with authority and autonomy to take decisions. If a traditional BA doesn't has this this place in the company, renaming him/her won't be enough to change the situation. In some cases, someone in the business is delegated to act as PO, with the necessary authority, but this person has no BA skills, or low availability. In those cases, a BA joining the agile team will be very useful.